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June 05, 2008

Daily Write: I Feel Trapped

The snow kept falling; a little more, every day. Just a couple of hours of light flakes drifting quietly to the ground from the steel grey skies, it seemed innocuous enough. For the first month, it was novel, even fun. I was living in The Great White North! It was remote, and a little forbidding. It felt adventurous!

By January, when the days were short, twilight arriving around 3:30 PM and complete darkness enveloping the outside world by a quarter after four, it was getting tiresome at its best, and deeply oppressive at its worst. The accumulation just kept piling up, as the days above freezing were few and far between. Soon, the only paths one could take, walking around campus, were those that had been cleared by the snowblowers.

A strange sensation, to stand in an open quadrangle, wide and expansive, and lined with beautiful old elms, and feel intensely claustrophobic... a guinea pig running through a maze... dorm to class to lab to home to dorm to library to dorm again... each day more night than anything, and full of bone-chilling cold, and always, the snow.